9 Surprising Lessons Learned from Gardening with Preschool Kids

My youngest is obsessed with plants. Last year he begged to plant some veggies, so we grabbed a few plants from Walmart and added them to a backyard flower bed. His obsession exploded! And the teacher mom in me saw so many lessons learned from gardening in our future.

So this year, we (Dad) built two raised garden beds. That wasn’t enough for my then five year old though. He actually asked if he could have a greenhouse for his birthday! How many five year olds have that on their wishlists?!? We told him we were going to start with two raised beds, and if he’s still just as interested next year, we will talk about adding on! Ha!

I wanted to document our memories in the garden, but the more we worked in the garden, the more the teacher in me saw SO many vital lessons for my preschoolers (and really kids of all ages!) out in the garden. So, I thought I’d share 9 surprising lessons learned from gardening with my preschool kids!

Hard Work Pays off!

Dad built two raised beds for us (with a little bit of kid help!). Knox got so excited to collect sticks when I pruned a tree in the front yard to add as filler to the beds. He readily volunteered to pull the wagon. And he wanted to do allllll the hard labor.

Why? Because when you are motivated, hard work seems less… hard! It just seems fun!

We filled the beds with old, non-treated wood scraps, sticks, leaves, and other biodegradable things we could find around the yard during spring cleaning!

After filling beds, we spent time growing our seeds, transplanting to the garden, seeding plants in the garden, planning how the beds would look. And then waiting!

But EVENTUALLY, our hard work paid off. Just look at that sweet face when he discovered his first harvest ever of the garden (over a month later!)–a fresh, crisp piece of lettuce! He ate the whole thing–warm!–and loved every bite. Hard work really does pay off!

ecosystems & Interdependence

While we were prepping the garden beds, we had to add in some worms! The kids LOVED this and there were so many lessons learned from gardening with worms.

The first lesson was that worms are slimy, but not scary! Once we got passed those fears, we got to talk about the garden as an ecosystem. We learned the big word, “interdependence.” The garden needs the worms to keep the soil loose and put nutrients back into the soil. And the worms need the garden for food and life!

Since our worm experience, the kids have started “rescuing” worms that get washed up after rains and running them to our garden. So cute!

In the education world, we teach ecosystems to 2nd graders and learn all about interdependence with The Cactus Hotel. But that 2nd grade concept was completely accessible to my preschoolers because of the hands-on garden right in front of them!

Can you spot the pollinators in the garden? These guys were moving FAST around the garden today and made it difficult to get a great shot, but pollinators are another huge part of the garden ecosystem. The plants and pollinators are definitely interdependent as well!

We found these caterpillars on our parsley a few weeks ago. I thought they were friendly, but Knox and I learned to look them up to be sure. They are the caterpillars for swallowtail butterflies! An amazing garden pollinator. We were SO excited. Now… the 5 caterpillars ate almost all of my parsley leaves, but I let them feed on that so that we could benefit from the butterflies soon. And they are all over our flower beds and garden now. So fun to watch and learn that life cycle and benefit.

Pollinator is another big 2nd grade science word my 5 year olds are using fluently now. They get SO excited to see all the butterflies and even the bees because they understand the bees are garden buddies and pollinate our veggies for us! We need the bees and the bees need our garden!

Speaking of bees! One of our family friends found out about Knox’s gardening obsession and invited him out to their huge garden. They are master gardeners, and have recently started beekeeping. I mean, what an amazing field trip for a 5 year old. Such good learning!

Up close of the bees from inside the car! And they even sent some jars of honey home with us. Best honey we’ve ever had!!

Patience, Patience, Patience

The excitement of building and prepping the garden quickly wore off after a few weeks in. The plants were growing, but no harvests yet. Soon, we had our first piece of lettuce, but the kids REALLY wanted cucumbers and tomatoes!

This was an excellent time to practice our patience! A life lesson for all of us: Good things come to those who wait. It was easy to not want to check on the garden for a while, but I tried to make it as fun as possible to keep us checking.

One of the other lessons learned from gardening is that there is work to be done in the waiting. While we were waiting to eat the veggies, there were plants that needed to be pruned, suckers that needing cutting, and marigolds that needed deadheading.

Focusing on something we could do instead of focusing on what we couldn’t have yet helped get us through!

Counting Skills In the Garden

Before we knew it, green tomatoes were appearing on our cherry tomato plants. And then that came with a little more frustration, because we had to have MORE patience to wait for them to turn red! But it was an exciting step!

To pass the time in the garden, I had Knox count how many tomatoes were on his vine. Then Evelyn would count tomatoes on a vine she found. We aren’t quite ready for comparing numbers yet, but this could easily be stretched into a whole math problem: Which vine has more (or fewer) tomatoes? How many more (fewer)?

Another great one we do once they start turning red is: How many tomatoes are on this vine branch? How many are red? So how many are still green? Just building the beginnings of that part-part-whole relationship with numbers. We have found so many counting lessons learned from gardening!

Measurement Lessons In the Garden

The green beans and cucumbers gave us a chance for even more math lessons in the garden! Green beans explode once they start producing. But we had to learn that they don’t turn colors when they are ready to pick like the tomatoes. They start out green and stay green! So we had to measure them instead.

We were looking for size instead of color (another bonus garden lesson–attributes of an object!)

For the green beans, I had him hold out his index finger. If the green bean was longer than his finger, he could pick it. If not, let it grow another day. Of course, we had some “too little beans” picked here and there, but it left room for more lesson learning! And I loved his little patient measuring with each green bean. Such pride in his garden!

For the cucumbers, we used their hands. Cucumbers also start out green and stay green and only start turning colors (yellow) when they’ve been on the vine too long. I had the kids pick the cucumbers when they were longer than their hand.

Here he is measuring cucumbers with his Master Gardener friend, Mrs. Jo.

Critical Thinking Skills

Funny school story since the kids just started kindergarten! Now that we are in full tomato harvest mode in the garden, we have been getting creative with our harvesting. We always bring a large basket out to harvest our vegetables, but those cherry tomatoes are prolific! Instead of tossing them in the basket each time, I started grabbing handfuls and putting them in my shirt tail. Before I knew it, the kids were copying my strategy too. (They are always watching and learning, even when you think you aren’t teaching!)

During the first week of kinder, Knox’s teacher showed me this. He accidentally made a mess of his two-sided counters. His sweet teacher said, “Uh oh, you made a mess, what do we do?” So he started cleaning…

And when she turned around, he had put the counters in his shirt tail just like we do in the garden! The teacher in me LOVES the transfer of strategy from garden to school. And I love seeing those critical thinking skills from the garden coming out in other places too! Woohoo!!

Plant Life Cycles

Another garden lesson is plant life cycles! This is in our school curriculum everywhere–especially in this kinder habitats unit. Learning plant parts, how it starts to grow, watching it grow before their literal eyes. The. Best.

One of our favorite lessons learned from gardening is that some plants bolt. Look at this lettuce plant!

It grew and grew and we couldn’t keep up with harvesting the lettuce fast enough (which was okay!). And then when it was done producing it bolted–or started flowering.

The fun lesson we learned the hard way is that once a veggie plant bolts like that…the veggies get super tough and bitter! Ha!

But look at those fun lettuce flowers. We left this in the garden just for some pretty and pollinator attracters for a while before pulling them. So cool!

Squash Bugs!!

Ugh. #iykyk

I actually scared Knox into not planting squash and zucchini this year because of the stories I told him of dealing with squash bugs in previous gardens we’ve had. But this was a great learning experience too. Just because something is hard, or gross, we persevere.

So, I did some research and learned that planting later in the season could help avoid or at least make the squash bug number lower. So we seeded our zucchini and squash mid-summer for a fall harvest. So far they are okay.

But… the pumpkin patch we started is NOT. Boo! I do feel like there are fewer of them. Just about 1-2 leaves of eggs to kill off of 9 plants and only 3-5 bugs we find each day.

I took advantage of my all-boy kid who loves a good fight or wrestle, and told him we were declaring war on the squash bugs. We added a red plastic cup to our gardening supplies and go out each day with soapy water and drown those eggs and stupid bugs. No we don’t call people or animals stupid in our house, but, yes, we say stupid when we are talking about squash bugs. Because that’s what they are!

Planning Skills & Goal Setting

Our last gardening lesson (that I’m blogging about anyway!) is planning and goal setting. Knox was planning what he wanted in his garden starting in January! We drew out a map, we researched companion plants that would help deter pests (best strategy ever mixing and matching plants–we’ve had a completely organic garden with very few pest problems–minus those stupid squash bugs!)

Visiting Mrs. Jo’s master garden gave him all kinds of inspiration for next summer!

I did have to disappoint him and tell him that corn was not a good fit for our suburban backyard!

But we have a farmer down the road that grows and sells the BEST sweet corn that we get every year and have a corn shucking and freezing day and freeze alllllll the cream corn to cook through the fall and winter!

We’ve had the BEST summer gardening and learning lessons from the garden. Now we are planning some cool weather plants for fall to add to our pumpkin patch!

And our kindergarteners are going to school fully prepared for the Next Gen Science unit on Habitats of Plants and Animals with some amazing hands-on experience and learning from the garden!